I would also like to announce that thanks to my friends, who infected me with the World Cup bug, I did my part on Sunday afternoon to improve international relations.Blame the summer storm, the kind that often brew up here in the late afternoons, pinging the chimney with fat droplets and making Edmund suspect that the sky, really and truly, is falling. I'd settled in with my knitting and had intended to wait until the second half to go to the gym to watch France-Italy, but partway through the first half, the storm grew so fierce that our satellite reception went kaput.

Certain conversational gambits should come with warning flags. I've decided that any conversation I start that begins with the phrase "So I was on the elliptical, and I was thinking…" should be treated with the same level of skepticism and distrust given to any conversation that starts with "There was this one time at band camp…" Nine times out of ten, it's going to be a boring, dull recitation -- but it's the pesky tenth time around that'll get you when you're not looking, and make you wish you carried a big fat wad of mental floss in your pocket.

Colorado is, after all, a landlocked state. Perhaps I should have considered this before attempting the quest I did on that warm winter day, but then again, sometimes you don't get to pick your quests. Your quests pick you.

I'd realized the shaggy state of my exercise swimsuit while I was in Colorado, and thought that since it was the off-season, I might be able to find a reasonably-priced swimsuit while I was on vacation. This, of course, led to the uttering of the World's Worst Sentence, which I knew better than to say but said anyway:

"How hard can this be?"

I dug around in the apartment until I found a phone book. "Swimwear." Yep, that was easy. Oh, look! A shop that specialized in swimwear, said they had plus sizes (which according to some manufacturers I still wore), and which carried mix-and-match separates? Perfect.

I've begun to suspect that there's a new craze sweeping my gym, and quite frankly, I'd like to find out who started the craze so that I may kill them.I think of them as the Anti-Fan Nazis. They're the people who come into the gym, turn off all the fans, and proceed to do a workout so light and easy I hesitate to even use the prefix work- in conjunction with it. Meanwhile, those of us who are working out, truly working out, are dying on the elliptical vine, drowning in our own sweat.

It had been nothing but a random provocation of muscle, an awkward-standing up that led to a consistent, throbbing ache in my right lat.

"Rub it?" I asked Jeff, hopefully. "Not like scritchies, but real massage work?"

From the master bedroom, he nodded. I picked up the nearest bottle of massage lotion and thought for a moment how much my life has changed in the past six months; my now-life dictates keeping a few bottles of massage lotion in different rooms around the house, because there's no telling when or where a sore muscle might strike.

"Which side of the bed? You're right-handed, and the sore muscle is on my right side…" I looked up and realized that Jeff was giving me his 'That's-too-much-information' look. I shrugged, took off my shirt, unhooked my bra, and lay down on the guest bed.

"Where's it at?" His hands, dry, pressed slowly down my back.

In the world of the gym, there are rules. Rules, I say!